GALLERY OWNER LOVES RISKS, REWARDS

Twenty years after he worked as a young air traffic control officer aboard the carrier Coral Sea, Tom Babeor still operates in an intense, high-risk environment. The difference is, now he’s the only one at risk.

Babeor specializes in the volatile field of contemporary art. Although he tends to steer clear of the most risky business--emerging artists--he admits that his 7 1/2-year-old La Jolla gallery is not out of the financial woods yet. Some years, he says, are better than others.

It’s better now than when he opened the Thomas Babeor Gallery in 1979 at 7470 Girard Ave. The first year, Babeor did not make a single sale. Two years later he was $55,000 in debt.

“I had $212 in my checking account,” Babeor recalled. “My accountant told me at some point you start throwing good money after bad, and I had reached that point six months earlier.” Babeor responded by borrowing another $10,000 and plunging ahead.

Although he denies that he is a success--the vagaries of the market and the uncertainty of clients’ wishes being too vast to predict--Babeor, a dapper dresser, can afford the things he likes such as designer clothing, the 19th Century French antique furnishings in his apartment, a Jaguar sports car and a Mercedes station wagon for hauling art around.

Today Babeor, 44, shows a number of established “middle-generation” West Coast artists such as Joe Goode, Laddie John Dill, Billy Al Bengston and Barbara Weldon. Visitors can walk into a front gallery and find an eye-catching Chuck Arnoldi chain-saw painting on wood, a Ron Davis “snap line” painting or one of Bengston’s ubiquitous iris paintings.

The back gallery, past the director’s office, is where Babeor has almost hidden his blue-chip artists, the ones with the international reputations. The back gallery currently has works by English sculptor Anthony Caro and abstract expressionist painters Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Arshile Gorky.

Babeor’s main focus is abstract expressionist art, but he also exhibits works by first-rank contemporary artists who do not fit that category, such as David Hockney, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly and Roy Lichtenstein.

Babeor must owe part of his success to a nearly total commitment to his work. He doesn’t separate his business, personal and social lives. “My life revolves around the gallery, around my calendar,” he says. On a recent day that was supposed to be his day off, a client from Orange County drove down to return a painting she had taken home to “live with” for a while. He took her out to lunch.

Once a week Babeor loads the station wagon for a trip to Los Angeles. He will carry one or more changes of clothes to suit the occasion, whether lunch with a client at a ritzy restaurant or a black tie opening at a gallery or museum.

“I love coming to the gallery,” Babeor said. “It’s the only thing in my life, or one of the few things, that I truly enjoy doing. Going to the gallery is like going to see my kids.

“It’s the only sanity in my life. Of course, I’m an insane guy.” Babeor pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “I’m always tense, hyper. Do you mind if I smoke--one of my lesser vices,” he said, joking.

Like most gallery directors who deal in the ever-changing world of contemporary art but who live outside the really large metropolitan areas, Babeor has had to build a reputation with art dealers in New York City, Los Angeles and other major cities.

“Fifty percent of my sales last year were to other dealers,” Babeor said. He sold 45% to private collectors and 5% to corporations or to art consultants. In 7 1/2 years he estimates he has sold to only a dozen San Diegans.

Born in Baltimore, Babeor attended a Jesuit preparatory school and graduated from Georgetown University in 1963 with a degree in philosophy. “My parents were the kind of people who said art was something you did on Sundays. You certainly didn’t make a living at it. They intended for me to go to law school.” But Babeor, who had always wanted to draw and paint, had other plans.

“I was still a little unfocused after getting out of the Navy,” said Babeor, who said he considered staying in. He decided on art after a stint in a management development program with Anaconda Copper Corp. While working with Anaconda in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, he took five years of UCLA extension art courses.

In 1975 he quit his job and tried to make it as an artist. “But I wasn’t willing to pay the price, to work washing dishes, to do what had to be done to paint.” He decided to try his hand as a dealer.

With a $139,000 nest egg from selling his house in Los Angeles, Babeor opened his La Jolla gallery.

“I’ve been accused of being elitist,” he said, for not carrying more local artists. He represents three San Diegans, Christopher Lee, Barbara Weldon and Jay Johnson.

In May, Babeor changed his exhibit format. Instead of the monthly one-man shows he has religiously shown for 7 1/2 years, he is now presenting group shows that run longer and will present only two or three one-man exhibits a year. “I would rather do solo shows, but this is San Diego, not New York or Los Angeles,” he said. A crate arrives while Babeor is speaking and he helps the deliveryman carry the bulky wooden box through the door. He is excited. It’s a small bronze sculpture by David Smith, sent by a Milwaukee gallery so that a client of Babeor’s can take a look at it. Smith, who died in 1965, is arguably the best sculptor the United States has produced.

Despite dealing regularly in works by such top contemporary artists, Babeor still has to work for most sales. “It’s just as hard today to make the business go as it was in 1979,” he says. “You keep the overhead low. Seven and a half years later I’m still making the weekly milk run to L.A. myself. I do the daily books, hang the work. I clean the toilets, and three days a week I’m in the gallery until 11 at night.

“But the gallery is my anchor. It’s my raison d’etre. I consider myself extremely lucky.”